BellaOnline Forums Relationships Married No Kids Wondering if I should keep doing MNK

Funny, one of the formerly (now removed) most frequent posters was someone who came here as a fencesitter while contemplating whether to pursue IVF or not. She seemed to feel right at home here, for quite a while, until the events of the past few days, when most of the regular posters have been given reason to feel this isn't the place they used to come for support and discussion with like minded people.

Cindy

I haven't posted for a while, not because of the actions of regular posters to this board but the actions of some new arrivals and trolls that felt the need to join in.

To address some of the issues covered within this thread though, let me give you a little background.
1. I'm childfree both by force and by choice. I'm 26 with early ovarian failure (in lay terms going through menopause about now) and therefore cannot get pregnant. The choice part is because we have chosen not to adopt or try medically assisted methods.

2. I came to this site looking for it to be supportive of my issues given that sometimes the external world is less than supportive.

I'm a little disillusioned by the fact that somewhere I came to rely on as a supportive environment has now been turned into somewhere that's moderated to within an inch of its life and designed to be more supportive to parents than the CF. I don't understand this development as, to my knowledge, we had a number of regular posters who were parents and who managed to interact quite well with the old crew.

Anyway, I appreciate that this is an enterprise and thus must cater for the masses (who happen to be parents and we daren�t offend them) however, I would like to raise a question as to why innocuous posters got deleted whilst Robotrix, who variously harassed and personally attacked members, is still there and her posts were not removed. That to me seems somewhat hypocritical and speaks to the moderators taking the comments of one out of context whilst embracing an anti-childfree stance.

Just my thoughts.

This is going to be my final post on the topic, and then I am ending this thread as it has turned into an unproductive, dead horse.

First, every account which was shut down was requested *by its owner* to be shut down. I think people who are making assumptions should look again at the post sequence. The posters who left asked to leave.

Second, the thread which was deleted, the one associated with Kim's rule statement, was full of inaccurate and hostile statements from both sides and was greatly inflaming the community unnecessarily. I received great praise from *both* sides of the fence when we removed that and began afresh.

Third, if someone believes a forum that requests healthy language is "being moderated to within an inch of its life", that is simply not true. There are many forums out there where every post must be approved before it is even shown. That is real moderation. Every forum I know of has word moderation. Every one. We are hardly unique in that sense.

This forum is *extremely* lenient and has only a very few basic rules. However, healthy, productive respectful discourse is one of them. If you desire to use words on the ban list, then certainly, there are many forums out there that allow it. This is not one of them. We will not apologize or feel badly for that fact. It is our mission to help as many people as we possibly can. Inappropriate words would make that impossible, because of filters and cultural mores.

Fourth, Robotrix was warned three separate times to behave and when he/she ignored those messages, he/she was banned. We always try to give multiple chances to any poster because, again, we have people from all over the world with language issues, cultural issues and religious issues who are trying to learn how forum etiquette works. It is our desire to help as many people as we can. This requires patience and understanding.

Finally, a key purpose of many of these changes is to ensure that MNK is a *positive* supportive environment where MNK individuals of all backgrounds can share encouragement and hope with each other. The banners explicitly tell non-MNK believers that they are not allowed to debate the MNK lifestyle in here. The MNK area is for support of MNK - not for MNKers to have to defend their choice. We have created that world here.

The other side of that is that we want the MNK area to *be* nurturing and supportive. Over the past months it has turned solely into a child-bashing area where members tried to one-up each other in remembering the world possible child situation and bingo, remembering and reliving and building up negative emotions one after enough. It is akin to going out to drinks every night and only talking about the awful things in your life, how much your job sucks and how there are no good men in the world. It is simply not what BellaOnline is all about. We are not here to depress and cynicalize and harden and fill peoples' hearts with anger and hate and nastiness. We are here to empower and enlighten and help women improve and be happy and successful. That is our goal, and our mission statement.

I believe wholeheartedly that MNK individuals CAN be happy and content. In fact, most people I know are MNK. They are quite happy and content. They feel no desire at all to worry about other peoples' kids, any more than they would rant about other peoples' dogs. They - naturally - focus on their strengths, they enjoy their gifts, and they share those with others. If we did that in here even *half* the time then it would be an amazing improvement and would change peoples' lives for the better.